We back Indian businesses going global, and we staff them.
More Indian consumer brands, services businesses and manufacturers are taking what works at home into markets abroad, and the hiring that goes with it is unlike anything else the company has done. The brief looks familiar: a general manager, a head of international business, a brand lead. The job is not familiar at all, and that is where searches go wrong.
What changes in a brief when the market is abroad?
When an Indian business hires for a market abroad, the brief has to describe a company that is established at home and starting from nothing in the new market at the same time, and the hire has to be able to operate in both.
Company stage is a skill in its own right, and international expansion is the clearest case of it. The company may be a mature, well-run business in India, with systems, a brand that is recognised and a leadership team that knows how things get done. In the new market none of that exists. There is no distributor, no team, no brand awareness, and often no clear idea yet of what the product has to become to sell there. The leader being hired is a build-from-zero operator inside a run-what-exists organisation, and they will be judged by people who have mostly done the second kind of work.
Most briefs for these roles describe the company as it is in India. That is the company the hire will report to, not the one they will work in. Our stage brief separates the two: what exists at headquarters that the hire can draw on, what exists in the market, which is usually very little, and how decisions and money travel between them. Candidates are shown both pictures and asked which one they have operated in before.
Which leaders do Indian companies hire when they go global?
Indian companies expanding abroad hire international business heads, country and regional general managers, export and distributor leads, global brand leaders and cross-border e-commerce heads, as well as leaders based in India who carry a global remit.
- Head of international business. Usually the first hire, often based in India, and often the person who decides which markets the company enters and in what order.
- Country and regional general managers. Based in the market, building a business from scratch, reporting to a leader several time zones away.
- Export and distributor management leads. For companies entering through partners rather than their own operations: appointing, managing and sometimes replacing distributors in markets they do not yet understand.
- Global brand and marketing leaders. Deciding what travels and what does not, and what the brand means to a customer who has no idea where it comes from.
- Cross-border e-commerce heads. Marketplaces, logistics and compliance in markets where the company has no physical presence.
Should you hire a local operator or send someone from India?
Whether to hire locally or send someone from India depends on which of the four Cs the role most needs, because a local hire brings market capability while someone from headquarters brings compatibility with the leadership and knowledge of how decisions really get made at home.
A hypothetical. An Indian snacks company enters a Gulf market. The founder wants a local country head who knows the retailers and the distributors. The search finds strong candidates, and the one hired is excellent at the market. Within months the relationship with headquarters has broken down. The country head is used to deciding locally and reporting quarterly; the founder is used to a phone call every evening and a say in every listing. Capability was never the problem. Compatibility was, and it was knowable before the hire if anyone had asked the founder how he actually works.
The reverse hypothetical. The same company sends a trusted operations lead from India to run the market. He knows the founder, knows the product and knows how to get a decision out of headquarters. What he does not know is the market, and what he has never done is build a distribution business where the company's name means nothing. He is a run-what-exists operator in a build-from-zero job, in a country he does not know. Sometimes this works, because the compatibility is so strong that headquarters gives him the room and the patience to learn. Often it does not.
Neither answer is right by default. The leader brief and the stage brief usually make it clear which of the four Cs this particular role cannot do without, and sometimes the honest answer is a local operator with a headquarters counterpart, in sequence or in parallel.
| Layer | In the home market | In the new market |
|---|---|---|
| Capability | Well understood; the company knows what good looks like | Unfamiliar; the company cannot easily judge local expertise |
| Culture | The company's own way of deciding, debating and rewarding | A local business culture the company does not yet know, plus its own, imported |
| Company stage | Running what exists | Building from zero, inside an organisation that is used to running |
| Compatibility | Leader and hire in the same building, or the same city | Leader and hire separated by distance and time zones, which magnifies every mismatch |
How does compatibility work across a time zone?
Distance magnifies a mismatch in decision style, because the small corrections that happen naturally when a leader and a hire share an office do not happen when they share a weekly call.
A founder who likes to be told things early will read a quiet week from the market as a problem. A country head who likes to bring a finished answer will read daily questions as distrust. In the same office these two would adjust to each other within weeks. Across a continent the misreading hardens into a view. So the leader brief for an international role spends more time than usual on cadence: how often the founder expects to hear from the market, how they want bad news delivered, how much room they will give someone they cannot see. Candidates are asked how they have worked with a distant leader before, and the accounts are compared before anyone is shortlisted. This is the fourth C, and it is the one almost nobody searches for.
How does The Corelation run an India-to-global search?
We brief the hiring manager before we brief the market.
Before any sourcing we sit with the founder or the leader the hire will report to and write the leader brief, with particular attention to how they will work with someone far away. We write a stage brief that separates the company at home from the company in the new market. We assess capability with a senior operator from our network who has built a business in a market abroad, and then we set it aside. Candidates are read against the leader and both stages, and hear the honest version. The one you hire comes with a handover note and a 90-day check-in, which for a leader abroad is often the first structured conversation about how it is going. Every step is on how we work, from the leader brief to the 90-day check-in.
We work for companies hiring in India and for Indian businesses hiring for markets abroad. The wider case for running a search on the four Cs is on executive search in India, and the sectors where our depth is first-hand, including consumer goods and retail and e-commerce, are on who we work with.